While there’s no doubt that Amish fiction is really hot right now, popular Christian fiction author Tricia Goyer never expected to hop on the bandwagon.
But when someone asked Tricia if she ever considered writing in that genre, well, the idea “hung around in her mind” for a while. After running into a friend of her daughter’s whose parents grew up Amish, the idea grew into something more. She began to write Beside Still Waters: A Big Sky Novel.
Not that this is really all that different from her past fiction. “I try to find amazing, true stories and then I craft the novels around those stories,” Tricia shares. “As protagonists, the Amish are amazing individuals. They are so much more complex than you’d imagine. As a group of people they work hard to keep the traditions of their ancestors, but each of them has their own challenges, their own dreams, their own motivations. The research and the interviews I do are what I feel set my novels apart. I appreciate my novels being true to life, and I have a feeling readers won’t be disappointed.”
One thing that makes Beside Still Waters different is that it’s set in a small Amish community in northwest Montana. “Many Amish books take place on farms in the midst of large Amish communities. The community in West Kootenai, Montana is set among logging and log homes and rugged mountains and majestic lakes,” Goyer continues. “Amish move to that community from all over the United States and it’s a place of adventure. I hope in Beside Still Waters readers will see a different side to the Amish. They’ll see them interacting more with an Englisch community, discovering they have much to learn as they also model a quieter way to live.”